Shelly Struggles to Shine

by Kit Rosewater

  Suddenly the grassy hills and tall park trees came into view. Shelly lowered her head. She ran faster than she had ever run before. She wondered if her legs looked more like wheels, the way they did on cartoon characters.

  Shelly slapped her hand on their meeting rock.

  “Made it! I win!”

  Kenzie arrived a few seconds later.

  “Jeez Louise,” Kenzie panted. “When the heck did you get so fast?”

  Shelly tried to answer, but she ended up coughing and laughing. Kenzie started laughing too. The girls sat in the shade and pulled their water bottles from their backpacks. They sipped on water and waited for Tomoko and Jules.

  “What was that all about?” Tomoko asked.

  “Speed work!” Shelly said.

  “Speaking of speed . . .” Kenzie pointed toward the sidewalk, where Bree rumbled toward them on her skateboard.

  “Ahoy!” Bree said. She pinned her hands to her hips and looked to the side, like the captain of a ship. The Daredevils laughed as Bree held her pose until her skateboard reached the rock. Bree kickflipped off her board and joined the others.

  “What’s new?” she asked.

  Jules smiled mischievously. “Funny you should ask . . .”

  She pulled out her phone and handed it to Bree. Kenzie leaned against Bree and clicked on the announcement.

  “Oh yes,” Bree said. “This poster is awesome. Do you think we’ll get to play against the Cherry Pits too?”

  “Shoot,” Shelly said.

  The others paused and looked at her.

  Kenzie cocked her head. “What?”

  “Oh.” Shelly’s cheeks went pink. She thought about Molly on the Cherry Pits, who practically barreled over the Daredevils at tryouts. That was exactly the kind of person who would get Star Skater. “I just . . . forgot they’d be playing.”

  Bree laughed. “They better,” she said. “I’m ready for another race with their jammer.” She leaped from the rock and stood in front of the others.

  “Let’s get in some speeeeeed practice,” Bree yelled. Her voice went up and down, sounding exactly like a game show announcer.

  Jules hopped off the rock and did a cartwheel over the grass. “Off-skates workout time!”

  Shelly smiled and jumped down next to Jules. Kenzie and Tomoko stepped down after. The girls put their hands into a circle. Bree led their team chant.

  “What are we?” she asked.

  “Dare—” Tomoko and Kenzie said.

  “Devils!” Shelly and Jules shouted.

  “Dare—”

  “Devils!”

  “Dare—”

  “Devils!”

  All five girls yelled at once.

  “Daredevils!”

  Bree cupped her hands around her mouth. “Laps!”

  “Come on,” Kenzie said. “Laps? Like in PE?”

  “Hey, don’t knock PE,” Bree said. She took off running toward the playground.

  Shelly did her best to stay close at Bree’s side, but the farther the team ran around the park, the harder it was to stay all together. The Daredevils started out running like an angry cluster of bees, but ended like a lazy kite tail flapping in the wind. Bree was first, then Shelly, then Kenzie, then Tomoko, and Jules last. They clutched their knees back at the rock, waiting for their breath to catch up.

  “Rats,” Shelly said. “You beat me.”

  Bree shook her head and grabbed her water. “Wasn’t a race,” she said. She set her bottle back down and reached for a stack of neon-green cones next to her bag.

  “Zigzags!” Bree yelled.

  The Daredevils set up the cones all around the field. Each cone was a few feet apart. Bree led the team in a line snaking their way through. When they made it one way, they changed order and snaked through again, and again.

  Shelly was starting to have fun with the obstacle course. She even let her arms spin at her sides and ran like a giant windmill! She hopped from foot to foot.

  “Woooo!” Shelly said.

  Thwack.

  Her calf smacked against one of the cones.

  “Careful with those turns!” Bree called from the end of the line.

  “She’s working on her bruise collection!” Jules yelled.

  Shelly rubbed her leg and kept jogging. “Right,” she said. But Shelly doubted that Star Skater would be awarded to the kid with the most bruises.

  Once the zigzags were done, Bree showed the team how to set up the course for their last drill: jammer jumps.

  Everyone chucked their backpacks into one huge pile in the middle of the field. The players had to run to the pile, leap over it, then catch their balance and keep running on the other side. Bree went first so the others could see how to keep their feet together. The tower of backpacks went all the way to Bree’s knees! Shelly wished she had the bouncy skates from her drawing.

  “Hi-yah!” Jules said as she threw a kick in the air. She vaulted over the backpack stack and did a somersault in the grass.

  “Nice one!” Tomoko called.

  “Don’t do that in skates, though,” Kenzie added. “Or it will add some major bruises to your collection.”

  Jules laughed and brushed the grass from her arms.

  Shelly was the last one to go. Bree, Kenzie, Tomoko, and Jules cheered from the other side.

  “Let’s go, Bomb Shell!” Bree called. “Show those backpacks who’s boss!”

  Shelly took a deep breath. She crouched in her classic derby stance, then jolted forward, racing across the field.

  “Yeah Shelly!” the others said. The tower of backpacks loomed in front of her. Shelly pulled her legs up and—

  Oof.

  Shelly landed right on top of the pile. Bree ran over.

  “That was great!” she said. “You kept your feet together and everything! You just caught one of the straps coming down.”

  Shelly pulled her legs in and wrapped her arms around them. Her plan for winning Star Skater wasn’t exactly getting off to a great start.

  Kenzie, Tomoko, and Jules sat down beside Bree.

  “Who’s leading tomorrow?” Kenzie asked.

  Shelly looked at the others nervously, waiting for someone else to volunteer. She still had no idea what kind of practice she could lead.

  “I will!” Jules said. “I’ll call it ‘Collecting Bruises 101.’” She grinned and pulled her phone out of her bag.

  “Or maybe just ‘Hip Checking 101,’” Kenzie said.

  Jules sighed. “Yeah, yeah . . . Hey! The tournament poster has a link to the New Mexico teams!”

  The Daredevils huddled around the screen.

  “Check out that one team!” Tomoko said. She pointed to a group of girls dressed in pink shirts. “They have horns on their helmets! Like unicorns!”

  “Ha, that’s awesome!” Bree said.

  Shelly leaned forward. There was something about the picture that made a little firefly in her head flicker and sputter to life. She never knew teams could put horns on their helmets.

  She studied the line of skaters and smiled. They looked like they had come right out of her sketchbook.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tuesdays were the art rotation at school, which meant it was the one day of the week Shelly got to set her sketchbook out on her desk instead of hiding it over her lap.

  “Squiggles!” the art teacher announced.

  “Yes!” Shelly whispered. She loved squiggle exercises. Shelly positioned her pencil over the blank page as the teacher took a piece of yellow chalk and made a tiny point on the blackboard. The chalk twisted around and around.

  “There,” the teacher said. She turned again to the class. “Copy the shape and turn it into anything from your imagination!”

  The way squiggles worked was that the teacher first made a weird half-drawing, then the students had to fit it into a picture somehow. Shelly had made zigzags into lightning bolts and swirls into water. She had made a wiggly line into a person dancing and a bunch of little curlicues into a bowl of wo
rms.

  She got to work, extending the half circles on the board into wheels of roller skates zooming over the track. She filled the skates with feet and legs and the full body of Kenzilla, roaring and swiping through the air. This time, Shelly gave Kenzilla gloves that turned into claws at the end. She finished the last claw tip and smiled. Her picture reminded her of the unicorn helmets she had seen the day before.

  Shelly wouldn’t have minded wearing claws herself at Jules’s “Bruises 101” practice that afternoon.

  “Through the tunnel again!” Jules cried.

  Shelly huffed and barreled forward across the field. She wore one backpack on her front and another on her back. According to Jules, the bags were supposed to be protection. Instead, they just felt like bulky weight sagging Shelly’s shoulders down.

  The four other girls stood in two lines of two, with a narrow tunnel between them. As Shelly ran into the tunnel, everyone threw their hips into Shelly’s side. Shelly dug her feet into the ground to keep her balance, but she couldn’t help getting jostled back and forth.

  “Nice, Bomb Shell! You made it!” Jules called once Shelly was through.

  “Wearing shoes,” Shelly said. She shrugged off the bags and let them fall with a heavy thud on the grass. “In skates I would have wiped out!”

  Tomoko lifted one bag onto her back, then reached for the other.

  “I think the point is to be ready to wipe out,” Tomoko said. “Most skaters can’t stay on their feet all the time.”

  “Yeah . . .” Shelly said. But with the tournament coming up, she didn’t want to be like most skaters. She wanted to be a Star Skater.

  Tomoko finished her turn and volunteered to lead the next day just as Shelly’s mom came down the sidewalk. Shelly waved to the others and grabbed her bag. After wearing two bags on her shoulders, her one backpack seemed a lot lighter than usual. Or maybe Shelly was getting stronger.

  Shelly’s mom hugged Shelly close to her side. She ran her hand through Shelly’s hair.

  “Missed you,” she said.

  Shelly smelled the clay on her mom’s dress. She smiled. “Missed you too.”

  They crossed the field to the back lot where Shelly’s mom had parked the old VW van. On Sundays, Shelly’s mom liked the long walk to her art class. On Tuesdays, she traded the long walk for a short drive.

  The VW rumbled down South Congress, across Lady Bird Lake, and over to East Austin. Almost every building had colorful murals painted along the side. There were aliens and movie stars and even giant breakfast foods dancing the cha-cha. The van dipped into a small parking lot nestled between a car wash and a veterinary hospital. The studio above the vet was part of a community art space where her mom taught.

  The stairwell door opened into a large room with easels and desks scattered everywhere.

  “Good evening,” Shelly’s mom said. She hung her sweater on a hook by the door. “I’ve brought the mini artist with me.”

  Heads popped out from behind their easels one by one. An older woman with short, blue-tinted hair peered over her glasses. Her mouth made an O of pleasant surprise.

  “Shelly!” Mrs. Otterloo said. “I have some extra candies in my bag.”

  Shelly smiled.

  Fen, another art student and one of Shelly’s friends in the class, waved from one corner of the room.

  “Observing or participating today?” they asked. They held a charcoal stick out toward Shelly, inviting her in.

  Shelly’s mom looked at Shelly and raised her eyebrows.

  Shelly glanced at the charcoal and back at her mom. “Um, participating,” she said. She sat down at the station next to Fen.

  “What are you making today?” Shelly asked.

  Fen scratched their square jaw and stared at the easel in front of them thoughtfully. “Don’t know yet.” They looked at Shelly and smiled. “Inspiration can come from anywhere, anytime!”

  “Yeah,” Shelly said, though she wasn’t exactly sure if inspiration would hit her tonight. Unlike with the squiggle exercises, students were allowed to draw anything they wanted in her mom’s art class. It didn’t have to start with a weird half-shape. The only catch was that once the students finished drawing, they had to form a hunk of clay into a 3-D version of their picture.

  Shelly had watched her mom’s class tons of times. She could move things from her head to paper, but moving a picture to a real thing seemed impossible. She glanced at the block of clay in front of her. It didn’t seem like it wanted to be anything else except clay.

  She shook her head. No wonder they called it a “block” when you couldn’t think of what to do.

  Scritch-scritch, scritch-scritch.

  The sound of charcoal over paper echoed around the room. But Shelly’s easel was still blank. She reached into her backpack and pulled out her sketchbook.

  “That looks interesting.” Fen gazed at the picture Shelly had drawn of Kenzie with the claws.

  Shelly blushed. “I made it today.”

  Fen nodded at the clay next to Shelly. “Bring it to life!”

  Shelly blinked and looked down at her sketchbook. “I can’t make a person.”

  “Oh,” Fen said. They tapped at Kenzie’s pointy fingertips. “I meant the glove design.”

  Glove design?

  Fen’s words bounced around in Shelly’s head. They got bigger and bigger with every breath, like a party balloon filling up with air.

  Shelly thought about the photo of the New Mexico team with the unicorn helmets. She thought about her sketches of bouncy skates and derby jerseys with wings.

  Roller derby was about being strong and brave . . . but it was also about being creative and different. Mambo had told the group to work on their team strategy and their look. Maybe that meant Star Skater wasn’t just about skating fast. Maybe the title could go to someone with the most awesome new derby gear!

  Shelly’s eyes gleamed as she imagined her pictures coming to life.

  Instead of doing silly sketches that made her teammates laugh, Shelly could turn her drawings into real designs that would make the Daredevils the coolest things on wheels!

  But Shelly’s gear wouldn’t just look good. It would help the team skate faster, and block better . . . all the things Shelly needed help with on the track. She imagined gear that would let her do quadruple spins and high jumps. That would have to get her named as Star Skater!

  Shelly pulled the block of clay in front of her. She dipped her hands into a bowl of water, then got to work ripping a piece off the side.

  At the end of class, the students all got up and wandered around the room to look at one another’s creations. Some people made figurines. Some had shaped the clay into other materials, camouflaging it as driftwood or stones. Fen made a miniature version of a tall building downtown that Shelly called the “owl building.” Fen told her the real name was the Frost Bank Tower, but smiled and said that “owl building” was better. Mrs. Otterloo made a pearshaped birdhouse, which she quickly informed everyone was actually a house for her two pet tarantulas, Minnie and Ginny.

  Everyone gathered around Shelly’s station last.

  “How lovely,” Mrs. Otterloo cooed. “What is it?”

  “It’s a claw,” Shelly said. “Well, actually it’s a roller derby glove that looks like a claw. I designed it.”

  The others nodded thoughtfully. Shelly felt like a real artist, standing there in front of her work. She couldn’t wait to surprise the Daredevils with her super-amazing plan.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Shelly’s sketchbook was filling up fast with ideas for winning Star Skater. She had to remind herself to look up from the pages in class or when shoveling food into her mouth at lunch. Derby practices were the hardest, since she had to put her sketchbook away completely.

  Tomoko brought everyone onto the park field Wednesday afternoon. Instead of forming a tunnel like they did in hip-checking practice or a line like in Bree’s practice, Tomoko had the team pretend they were on the derby track. Sh
e clustered the blockers close together.

  “Now we’re going to jog slowly—”

  “Jogging?” Jules said. “I thought we already did jogging!”

  “That was speed work!” Bree called from behind. “We didn’t jog, we flew!”

  Bree stood half a field away, raring to come crashing into the group.

  The blockers started lumbering forward. Tomoko turned to Jules. “We’re not working on speed,” she said. “Bree gets to run, but we don’t. She has the speed advantage, just like jammers in real bouts. We have to practice our form for when Bree gets to us.”

  When the Daredevils scrimmaged against other teams on the league, Shelly and the blockers didn’t block Bree—they helped her find an opening, and they blocked the opposite jammer. But in practice, Bree had to switch back and forth between being herself and the opposing team’s jammer. Right now, she was pretending to be on the other team.

  “Here I come!” Bree yelled. She took off sprinting across the field.

  The blockers checked for Bree over their shoulders.

  “Labyrinth!” Tomoko said. Labyrinth was a blocking plan Tomoko and Kenzie came up with the week before. The blocking pack split into two pairs: Shelly and Kenzie, then Tomoko and Jules. When Bree made it to one pair, the other raced ahead. That way, if Bree passed one set of blockers, there was always another set ahead of her.

  “Like a never-ending labyrinth,” Kenzie explained.

  Shelly felt a jolt on her left hip. Bree’s momentum had split the Dynamic Duo in two.

  “Next level!” Shelly called.

  Tomoko and Jules scrambled ahead. Bree spun and dove and squirmed between them.

  Jules waved her arm. “Next level!”

  The team went like that for the rest of the lap around the field, racing ahead and throwing walls in front of Bree. But Bree broke through every time.

  “I’m not good at this,” Shelly said as Bree slid past her.

  Tomoko whistled and the group slowed down. They walked back to their meeting rock.

  “Yes you are,” Kenzie said. “Bree’s just an awesome jammer. She makes it look easy.”

  Bree smiled and elbowed Kenzie’s arm.

  “Are you kidding? That blocking play is SO good. I could get through two of you at a time, but not all four! And Jules, those hip checks were killing me!”